Progress report

I was able to work on the book! Yay! I finished editing the YA book, except that I'm not totally happy with it--the final chapter or two seem a bit rushed, so I want to go back and noodle with it a bit more.

Progress report

Today I edited another six chapters--it's really good and relatively clean. I'm kind of hoping that's because it took me longer to write, so I went over the material several times during that process. That would be the good version. It's either that or I've completely forgotten how to edit....

Anyway, yesterday after I posted I went back to work on the cover and did the text, which I tweaked a bit today as well. I like it--I wound up not using the lettering I thought I would, but I think it's cleaner. The title frames the dragon a bit and makes it stand out more, which is nice.

Progress report!

Whoo-whoo! Because my current situation is pretty unfavorable for writing, I figured I'd start going over the YA book instead. So today I edited four chapters--it actually looks really good, I was pleasantly surprised!

Ugh, 'kay....

I just got a great big new bookkeeping project as part of our recent--I guess restructuring in the word. That will probably snow me under until tax time proper.... I may try to at least get some editing done on the YA book since things really look like shit for writing right now.

Another cover!

Today wasn't very writing-friendly, but I had some time, so I decided to take a(nother) poke at the YA fantasy novel cover, incorporating some handy photos I took this summer of a volcanic wasteland. I haven't done text yet.

Getting the dragon to look like it belonged up there was probably the hardest part, and I'm not sure I've nailed it.

The back cover is just going to be another eerie photo, so it looks a bit abrupt in a layout, but as long as I do the spine correctly, it should look OK on an actual book:

I'll probably move the text box down and get rid of the plants in the foreground--they look a bit weedy there. Do YA novels usually bother with jacket copy? I'd definitely be psyched to do without....

The Bing ring

So, the Bing campaign just really isn't going anywhere, in large part, I suspect, because very few people actually use Bing.

That's from my Block B Web site. It's illuminating to have different window onto the Web, isn't it?

Of course Bing's solution to this is for me to not use so many "low volume search terms," but hey, I went down that road once before, and it was really expensive. So, I'm glad I did this, especially since it let me try out search-engine advertising for free, but I'm going to conclude that Bing is not an effective marketing avenue.

But I may look into Google....

Arrrarrrarrrarrrrarrrgh

OK--I thought I would be able to start writing again sooner rather than later, but it turns out that The Bank of Slowness and Non-Communication actually got something done (as a matter of fact, they did it A FUCKING MONTH AGO and didn't see fit to tell us), which means that I've got to focus on settling everything out from that.

I guess I should be happy that they managed to get anything done at all (you might think that your money belongs to you, but The Bank of Slowness and Non-Communication knows otherwise), but yeah--I really would have appreciated a heads-up. A MONTH AGO.

The Bank of Slowness and Non-Communication: We're on our own schedule, because Fuck You.

ETA: I should note that, despite the fact that the bank could have handled things better, I'm really happy with the change that was made--this is one of those things that is going to require a lot of attention from me in the short term but should make things LOADS easier in the long term.

 

This is not impressive

So far I have 11 keywords up on the Bing campaign, and this is the message I get for 10 of them when I check to see if the ads associated with them are being displayed.

Yeah, OK. I've already had to contact support because my account was "suspended" (not actually suspended, it just told you that it was, because that's good design), and at this point I'm feeling like the PIA factor is pretty ridiculous. I know it's been a while, but what I recall of advertising on Facebook was that it was truly "set it and forget it"--you weren't expected to ride herd on it to make sure it did what it had to do in order for the company to make any money....

And, by accident

Hey! I'm actually doing a little promotion, entirely due to chance! I wanted to improve the search-engine optimization for BlockB.com, so I signed on to the Bing Web administrator thingy, and they gave me a coupon for $100 in free advertising on Bing, Yahoo, and some other search engine no one actually uses, I don't remember what it's called.

I never tried search-engine advertising before (I mostly stuck with Facebook), but hey, it's free, so I figured I'd put in a little text ad for Trang. We shall see if it has any impact or is worth doing.

It will also be interesting because when I last did this three years ago, I got the best results by explicitly targeting Kindle users. It will be interesting to see if that helps this time around, or if people are just so used to reading on their phones at this point that it won't matter....

Progress report

Not a lot done today (and even less done yesterday because of other responsibilities), but I did manage to sketch out how the next scene is going to go. I'm pretty happy with it--in this volume some minor characters become a bit more major, so it's fun to flesh out how they're going to sound.